Kanye West … ‘It’s everybody else’s fault for failing to fully appreciate how busy and important he is.’
Photograph: Christopher Polk/Getty Images

Kanye West unveils new album The Life of Pablo at elaborate, 'ramshackle' event

Read more

The 21st century offers a panoply of options for the pop star wishing to launch their new album. They can do it in time-honoured style: working the interview circuit, touring hard, keeping their fingers crossed for good reviews. They can go for the surprise approach and suddenly plonk it online without fanfare. Or, if they’re Kanye West, they can hire Madison Square Garden and charge people $160 a ticket to come and watch him play new songs off a laptop; show his new clothing collection in a presentation directed by contemporary artist Vanessa Beecroft that turns out to involve a lot of models just standing there for over an hour; give a couple of his famous speeches about the world’s failure to fully recognise his polymath genius and announce a video game that appears to entail the player piloting an avatar of West’s late mother Donda through the gates of heaven. West protested the games industry had proved strangely unenthusiastic about this latter idea, a state of affairs about which he sounded more surprised than perhaps he should have.

The whole thing was beamed to umpteen cinemas around the world and streamed online: 20m people apparently tuned in. It was at turns, rambling, chaotic, deeply underwhelming, impressively audacious, and completely infuriating, which, whether by default or by design, made it a perfect match for The Life of Pablo, an album that’s also all of those things.

Kanye West releases album and fashion collection at Madison Square Garden – video

Its release marks the end of a lengthy journey. Over the course of the last two and a half years, the album has undergone four name changes and been through at least two almost entirely different iterations. At various junctures, its supporting cast has included everyone from P Diddy to Paul McCartney. Indeed, it was still evidently in a state of flux during its world premiere: West subsequently spent another two days alternately tinkering with it and leaving messages on Twitter: at one juncture announcing “I am consumed by my purpose to help the world,” at another posting a series of gnomic Tweets about St Paul, who you got the sinking feeling was being added to the ever-expanding list of historical figures Kanye West thinks he’s not unlike.

Kanye West bingo: a party game for The Life of Pablo

Read more

But you don’t need to have been keeping close watch on West’s social media feeds to know that The Life of Pablo is an album that’s been faffed about with over a long period of time: it sounds like it. In place of the stylistic coherence of Yeezus, with its distorted electronics and overriding air of screw-you fury, there’s a record that’s audibly undergone endless revisions. It appears to have had ideas thrown at it until it feels messy and incoherent: over the course of four minutes, the two-part Father Stretch My Hands endlessly changes its tempo and mood, stopping and starting, its sound heaving from crackling old gospel samples to pop chorus to a stark mesh of bass, drums and snarling to a hushed vocoder interlude. The problem is that it doesn’t really have a cumulative effect: it just sounds confused and scattered, which may well reflect its author’s state of mind. Feedback features West finally doing what the rest of the world has been doing for the last few years and wondering aloud whether he’s actually gone round the twist: in the background, a sparse loop, apparently made from the titular noise, thrillingly spins out of tune, then starts to cut out, supplanted by sudden bursts of atonal screeching.

Elsewhere, Ultralight Beam and Low Lights/High Lights don’t feel episodic so much as fractured, and a track as great as the simultaneously euphoric and elegiac Waves turns up alongside the sparse, self-pitying collaboration with the Weeknd, FML, which lasts under four minutes but still contrives to feel like it’s dragging on forever, despite the fact that it features the deeply improbable sound of West duetting with a sample of the late Larry Cassidy, who probably never imagined he would be cropping up on one of the world’s most talked about albums when he recorded his vocal line as a member of the second-string post-punk band Section 25 in the early 80s. 30 Hours, meanwhile, starts out beautifully judged – its alternately rueful and boastful lyrics backed by ghostly samples of avant-garde disco innovator Arthur Russell and a writhing synthesised bassline – but it’s allowed to meander until it’s about twice as long as it needs to be, dissipating its impact in the process.

Kanye West … Performing in New York on 12 February. Photograph: James Devaney/GC Images

Occasionally, you fancy you can hear the influence of music that wasn’t even released when West began making the album. If the album’s scattergun sound – gospel, 70s soul, old Chicago house, post-punk, electronica – might conceivably be a response to Kendrick Lamar’s kaleidoscopic To Pimp a Butterfly (albeit with substantially less to say about the state of the world, beyond a token “pray for Paris” and what could conceivably be a passing reference to the shooting of Michael Brown, the state of the world being substantially less fascinating to Kanye West than the state of Kanye West) then the mournful Real Friends definitely feels like a track inspired by Lamar’s U. The big difference between them seems pretty telling. On U, Lamar flagellated himself to the point of tears over the way fame and self-absorption had distanced him from his roots; West’s initial expressions of remorse are quickly supplanted by the loudly expressed belief that it’s actually everybody else’s fault for failing to fully appreciate how busy and important he is.

Indeed, while there are great lines and verses here, not least the funny, smart No More Parties in LA – which features Lamar – you’re occasionally struck by the sense that West doesn’t really have that much to say this time around, or at least not much that he hasn’t said before, unless you count the moment on Wolves where he appears to compare Kim Kardashian to the Virgin Mary, the similarities between his wife and the mother of Jesus having curiously escaped everyone else. Mostly West sticks to the fairly well-worn topic of how talented and successful he is. Complaining about a rapper being self-aggrandising feels a bit like complaining about someone who works at an all-night garage pushing Rizlas and Snickers through a metal flap at 4am: it’s what they do. Ever since the first hip-hop MC lifted a microphone to their mouth in the mid 70s, self-aggrandisement has rather been the point. Even so, something about Kanye West’s brand of immodesty seems to rub people up the wrong way, and listening to The Life of Pablo, you can see why.

Famous is a flatly fantastic piece of music that may be the best thing on the album: there’s something clever, dextrous and irresistible about the way it weaves a brilliantly warped sample of Sister Nancy’s ebullient reggae classic Bam Bam around a mournful snatch of Jimmy Webb’s Do What You Gotta Do, first sung by Rihanna, then sampled from Nina Simone’s 1968 recording of the song. But you don’t have to be a huge Taylor Swift fan to find the lyrics spectacularly disingenuous to the point of being a bit unpleasant. “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex – I made that bitch famous,” he raps, curiously neglecting to point out that before he interrupted her acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV VMAs Swift’s second album had already sold 5m copies in America alone, gone platinum in 10 countries and enjoyed the decade’s longest run at the top of the US. He then goes on to equate her with “all the girls that got dick from Kanye West” but aren’t as rich and successful as him.

The charitable assessment here is that West is just trolling, which, with the best will in the world, is still hardly the most edifying sphere of human activity for an apparently time-pushed polymath to indulge in. If he is possessed of the kind of self-awareness occasionally suggested by TLOP’s lyrics (“I love you like Kanye loves Kanye” he offers on a brief a cappella freestyle), he might take a minute out of his pressing schedule to consider that one thing setting him apart from the kind of geniuses he compares himself to is that Picasso, Galileo, Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci seem to have had better things to do with their time than waste it going “yeah, your mum LOL”. The uncharitable assessment is that he’s a deluded pillock who actually believes what he’s saying. Listening to Famous, you do find yourself wondering if anyone else has ever managed to seem so brilliant at what they do and such a thundering cock and balls of a man at exactly the same time.

The Life of Pablo ends with one of its unqualified successes. Fade woozily interleaves two house classics – Fingers Inc’s Mystery of Love and Barbara Tucker’s Masters At Work-produced Beautiful People – with a snatch of barked vocal from Rare Earth’s psychedelic cover of the Temptations’ (I Know) I’m Losing You to startling effect: proof that when The Life of Pablo is good, it’s very good indeed. What it isn’t is consistent. Perhaps it’s the sound of a man over-reaching himself. Perhaps it’s a document of a mind coming increasingly unglued: you can find plenty of evidence here to support that interpretation. Or perhaps it’s something more prosaic. One of the weirder side effects of the Madison Square Garden event was to make his music seem like a secondary consideration to his fashion range. The focus seemed to be on the clothes, which might well explain the distinct lack of focus on the album.